Top 100 Karen Joy Fowler Quotes
#1. Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we'd been hurt ourselves.
Karen Joy Fowler
#2. Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.
Karen Joy Fowler
#3. Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.
Karen Joy Fowler
#4. Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.
Karen Joy Fowler
#5. So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me.
Karen Joy Fowler
#6. I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out
Karen Joy Fowler
#9. The monkey girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again. When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum?
Karen Joy Fowler
#11. I do read all my work aloud as I'm working - this has made it a little hard to adjust to my husband's retirement. I can shout the shouty parts if I'm alone in the house, but of course, I feel a fool if someone is there to hear me.
Karen Joy Fowler
#12. We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we're completely beside ourselves.
Karen Joy Fowler
#13. Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see or smell it?
Karen Joy Fowler
#14. Where you succeed will never so much matter as where you fail.
-We Are All Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler
#16. We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.
Karen Joy Fowler
#17. The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima's feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy's down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there's a benefit to not sharing a language.
Karen Joy Fowler
#18. In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.
Karen Joy Fowler
#19. There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face.
Karen Joy Fowler
#20. Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.
Karen Joy Fowler
#21. Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.
Karen Joy Fowler
#22. You know how everything seems so normal when you're growing up," she asked plaintively, "and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?
Karen Joy Fowler
#23. It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique
our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language
some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.
Karen Joy Fowler
#24. Just ask yourself, if we weren't taught to be women, what would we be? (Ask yourself this question even if you're a man, and don't cheat by changing the words.)
Karen Joy Fowler
#26. It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her.
Karen Joy Fowler
#28. Ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be. With Harlow.
Karen Joy Fowler
#29. I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.
Karen Joy Fowler
#30. Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#31. What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?
Karen Joy Fowler
#32. I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.
Karen Joy Fowler
#33. How was your day, Rosie?" Dad would ask when he came home from work and I'd tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. "That's good to hear," he'd say.
Karen Joy Fowler
#34. My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.
Karen Joy Fowler
#35. Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.
Karen Joy Fowler
#36. I wasn't happy, exactly, but I was remembering how happiness felt.
Karen Joy Fowler
#37. The secret to a good life," he told me once, "is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you're doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.
Karen Joy Fowler
#38. Solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside
Karen Joy Fowler
#39. When you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three.
Karen Joy Fowler
#40. You know, I don't think there's anything truly unforgivable. Not where there's love.
Karen Joy Fowler
#41. But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.
Karen Joy Fowler
#42. Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she'd always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist. Every girl's dream, if she can't have a vampire.
Karen Joy Fowler
#43. Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.
Karen Joy Fowler
#44. I'm being careful with here, Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn't even had the time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were good assumptions.
Karen Joy Fowler
#45. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second.
Karen Joy Fowler
#46. Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I'm not.
Karen Joy Fowler
#47. There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.
Karen Joy Fowler
#48. My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.
Karen Joy Fowler
#49. I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.
Karen Joy Fowler
#51. My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.
Karen Joy Fowler
#52. At five of five, I called the airline number - 800-FUCK-YOU - and was told I had to speak directly to lost luggage at the Sacramento Airport. No one answered in Sacramento, though my call was important to them.
Karen Joy Fowler
#53. Don't side with assholes, she said. Her voice was very not chill.
Karen Joy Fowler
#55. I'm seeing so much of America today, Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him - whenever things were not to his liking, he'd say that - I'm seeing so much of America today.
Karen Joy Fowler
#56. Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.
Karen Joy Fowler
#57. I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#58. It was one of her delightful qualities; she wept with those who wept.
Karen Joy Fowler
#59. The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
Karen Joy Fowler
#60. I had a very loyal cult-like following, I feel. And I don't mean to complain about that.
Karen Joy Fowler
#61. There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.
Karen Joy Fowler
#62. If we see a sad rain, it doesn't mean the rain is sad, but it means we see it. That's an easily dismissible kind of projection. But what I'm struggling to say, is that we take that rain in through our own hearts and emotions and senses and skin, and all those filters have an impact.
Karen Joy Fowler
#63. Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
Karen Joy Fowler
#64. The only way to make any sense of the United States Congress, our father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study.
Karen Joy Fowler
#66. I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.
Karen Joy Fowler
#67. When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.
Karen Joy Fowler
#68. In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery.
Karen Joy Fowler
#69. It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.
Karen Joy Fowler
#72. A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember.
Karen Joy Fowler
#73. I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them. Freak or fake, I'd been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and here was someone bold enough to be both.
Karen Joy Fowler
#74. So the studies don't back me up. There'll always be more studies. We'll change our minds and I'll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong.
Karen Joy Fowler
#75. The happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#76. Scully was appallingly gregarious - so outgoing she was practically incoming.
Karen Joy Fowler
#77. When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.
Karen Joy Fowler
#78. There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science
Karen Joy Fowler
#79. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't
Karen Joy Fowler
#80. Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#81. The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind.
Karen Joy Fowler
#82. I'd no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential - I was torn between the two.
Karen Joy Fowler
#83. Like they say, you never know a person till you've done time with them.
Karen Joy Fowler
#84. You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#85. We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies,
Karen Joy Fowler
#86. Out there is South Dakota," Kitch had said, "Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.
Karen Joy Fowler
#87. He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed.
Karen Joy Fowler
#88. We sat around our own table, an island of sad reflection in an ocean of merry din.
Karen Joy Fowler
#90. Over the years i've come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we've done and more to do with who they are.
Karen Joy Fowler
#91. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.
Karen Joy Fowler
#92. It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.
Karen Joy Fowler
#93. Fair warning, as it turned out - kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.
Karen Joy Fowler
#94. I want a normal girlfriend. Someone restful. You know anyone like that?"
"I'd volunteer if you were rich," I told him. "Like hugely rich. I could be restful for massive sums of money."
"Flattered. But no.
Karen Joy Fowler
#95. All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.
Karen Joy Fowler
#96. I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
Karen Joy Fowler
#97. The secret to a good life, he once told me, 'is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you're doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.'
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler
#98. Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.
Karen Joy Fowler
#99. So I could see that Harlow was fundamentally untrustworthy. Simultaneously, she seemed like someone with whom I could be my true self. I had no intention of doing so and, with and equal and counterbalancing intensity, a great longing for it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#100. IN MOST FAMILIES, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don't see it, but it's obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It's hard to always come in second.
Karen Joy Fowler
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